The Fourth Kind (Review, Trailer)

  

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Written by Chris YogerstcloseAuthor: chrisyogerst Name: Chris Yogerst
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About: Editor for Parcbench and NewsReal Blog as well as contributor to Big Hollywood.See Authors Posts (88) on November 6, 2009

Disclaimer**the best advice I can give you is to not do any research on this film before you see it.  My analysis of this film may spoil certain aspects, so if you want to see this film please read my review after you’ve seen it.

Do you know anyone who has admitted to seeing an alien, UFO, or anything else from the paranormal realm?  With the abundance of shows on television these days it would be easy to assume most people have.  I have a feeling this is a trick that all of these “ghost hunting” type shows wants us to believe.  By watching many of these shows I’ve come to one catch-all reaction to them: “yeah….whatever.”

How can we tell what is real and what is fiction?  Our eyes and ears can play tricks on us and some filmmakers try to capitalize on that.  This is the primary focus of films (and shows) that deal with the supernatural.  The Fourth Kind specifically deals with alien abduction and its effect on humans after the fact.

In the height of the talks about Paranormal Activity we have another film that leaves the audience questioning what is real and what is not.  In a similar fashion to the marketing of The Blair Witch Project years ago, The Fourth Kind gives us a good deal of material that feels very real.  The film even opens with Milla Jovovich introducing herself (a mistake) and telling us “what you choose to believe is up to you.”

Jovovich plays Dr. Abigail Emily Tyler who is a psychologist in the small, secluded town of Nome, Alaska.  Upon realization that numerous patients share the same delusions, she conducts a series of hypnoses on all of them who share the same set of unique nightly visits from an owl.

The bulk of the film is presented as a combination of what we are led to believe is real footage juxtaposed with the reenacted film.  Many scenes show us a side by side of the new and old film.  When the intensity grows, predictably we see only the archive footage to build up the element of realism.

The issues with the archive footage are twofold as they blur at all the right times so we don’t clearly see what is going on.  One could view this as annoying and a dead giveaway that none of it is real.  Another person with a wild imagination could view this as even scarier.  The sound in these scenes is intense and could trigger the mind to come up with things far worse than what are on the screen.  Remembering some of the sound bites as I write this gives me chills.  While the picture may not always look real, it sure sounds real!

I’ve heard people tell me that even the trailers to this film scared them.  I’ll admit some of the scariest scenes of this film are shown in snippets in the trailer.  What makes them effective on some level is the idea that some of this “might be real.”  Of course, it is hard to believe Hollywood when they tell us anything, let alone when they say that some obscure archive footage of an unknown psychologist is real.

The story is far from air tight, but that probably won’t be an issue for most.  Horror films scare the best when we know very little.  Nothing scares us more than the unknown.  The best thing this film could have done and didn’t, was telling us “hey, this is real.”  Having Milla Jovovich on the screen to shut down any skeptics made me that much more skeptical about the whole film.  Was that necessary?

It would be far scarier if we left the theater wondering if it was real or not.  That way we would watch the whole film thinking, “Wow, I hope this isn’t real!”  The opening shot of the “real” Dr. Abigail Tyler was incredibly eerie.  If this film opened with that shot instead of Jovovich’s ploy for audience confidence it would have had people slouching in fear from the first frame.

How you view this film ultimately comes down to what kind of horror film fan you are.  The more horror films you see the harder it will be for this film to please.  On the other hand, the novice horror fan may find this film delightfully terrifying.

Film Grade: B-

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